In yesterday’s blog, I talked about Facebook’s warning of potential hacks from international governments. Facebook, and others, may have a reason to be concerned.
According to a cyber security company named CrowdStrike, a close ally of the US government, Chinese hackers have gone after American corporate interest for weeks. In fact, this cyber security agency employs former NSA and FBI experts in their war against cyber attacks. This would violate the most recent agreement between United States and China which says in layman’s terms, “We won’t hack you if you don’t hack us”. CrowdStrike says it’s really bad against US technology companies and the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, CrowdStrike says the first of these attacks came on September 26. That’s the very day after US President Barak Obama and Chinese President Xi Jiniping made the anti-hack pact. We don’t know which company was hit because of confidentiality. But they take credit for finding and thwarting the attacks before it got too serious. In other words, no corporate secrets were leaked and nobody’s personal information was compromised. CrowdStrike chose not to discuss how they knew it was China, since hackers are so good at hiding their IP and disguising themselves. But they did say Deep Panda was a main suspect. That’s a hacking group believed to be close to the Chinese military.
Okay, if they’re not going to tell the public which companies were hit, I hope they told everybody in the respective company that was attacked, from the CEO to the custodian. If they’re told, at least they’ll look out and protect themselves. I believe it’s better to warn people than let people believe nothing is happening or that nothing will ever happen. I also believe there are two sides to every story. We heard one side. Of course, China insists their hands are clean, and it was the threat of US sanctions that got their attention. What is China‘s side of this story?